Monday, July 13, 2009

Making the journey worthwhile

What I learned about myself between last night and this morning is that if there's a hint of chill in the air in the evening, when we go out to walk the dog after dinner at about 7:30 p.m., I MUST have a jacket on. Maybe even long pants. I cannot tolerate being even slightly cold at the end of the day. But in the morning, when I take the dog out at 7 a.m., I am delighted by the crisp promise that the chill morning air offers and I can't stand to take a jacket with me. It's entirely possible that it is colder in the morning than in the evening, and there I am with shorts and short sleeves and a smile.

I know that some measure of this is physiological; I am a morning person and my energy is all bright and burning in the morning. By the end of the day I am done. I actually don't mind one bit getting into bed before it's even fully dark out because I am tired and done and ready to sleep. So my biorhythms or whatever are set on 'high' in the morning and 'low' at night. And I guess there's no way to disconnect the psychology either. It's just funny to me to have realized it and to understand that the given temperature doesn't really predict how the temperature is going to feel to me (or to anybody else?).

(I just googled biorhythms and came away with the impression that there's a lot less science (none, maybe?) to them as I thought there was, but what I meant are the particular highs and lows of your own system throughout the course of a given day.)

For me the point of these kinds of seemingly pointless realizations is to build my tolerance of these same kinds of idiosyncrasies in those I love. If I can be so apparently irrationally impacted by the weather, then trying to insist that Dean put on a jacket because it's "cold" out really is not very fair at all. Like that. That the reality each of us experiences, even on a very micro level, is entirely personal, even when it seems that it shouldn't/couldn't be. That the 'truths' we are so sure of ourselves don't necessarily carry.

2 comments:

My internal thermostat agrees with yours. I freeze in the evenings at the same temperature I was comfortable at during the day. And my the bodies of my little monkeys seem to run at least 5deg warmer. They're wonderful for winter cuddles.

this is such a lovely post and so true. I do wish I was a morning person though, I think getting to school/work all those years would of been so much easier. So true what you have said about others, my girls don't seem to feel the cold a lot of the time and Shayne nags them to put on socks etc and I remind myself when I was very young I didn't feel the cold either. Sorry I have been such a slack blogger friend lately, I am just skimming by at the moment health wise and just doing what I can

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